this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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Mozilla warns Germany could soon declare ad blockers illegal (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
submitted 2 days ago by schizoidman@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34873574

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[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 75 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Axel Springer says that ad blockers threaten its revenue generation model and frames website execution inside web browsers as a copyright violation.

This is grounded in the assertion that a website’s HTML/CSS is a protected computer program that an ad blocker intervenes in the in-memory execution structures (DOM, CSSOM, rendering tree), this constituting unlawful reproduction and modification.

This is complete bullshit thought up by people who have no idea how computers work. It's basically the failed youtube-dl DMCA takedown all over again. The (final?) ruling basically said that website owners cannot tell people how to read their websites.

BTW, Axel Springer products are the equivalent of FOX in America and they are often embroiled in lawsuits against them. Just saying.

[–] Natanael@infosec.pub 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Ad blockers do literally the reverse, they don't inject anything, they sit on the outside and prevent unwanted resources from loading.

Also it's fully legal for the end user to modify stuff on their own end. And the information in the filter about the website structure is functional, not expressive - no copyright protection of function.

To claim copyright infringement for not rendering a website as intended due to filters also means it would be infringement to not render the website correctly for any other reason - such as opening the website with an unsupported browser, or on hardware with limited support, or with a browser with limited capabilities - or why not because you're using accessibility software!

[–] localhost001@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Agreed. By their logic, it would be illegal to write on a newspaper or cut parts out of it because that’s not how the copyright holder intended it lol

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